Thread: Questioning chirine ba kal

Originally Posted by Shemek hiTankolel

Well, as you know, Academia is a whole other world that caters to some, while ignoring others. If Phil's primary experience with publishing comes from this arena, then I'm not surprised that mistakes were made. It's really too bad because I think the effects are still being felt today when it comes to a wider audience appeal for Tekumel. Hopefully Bethorm will rectify this somewhat.

Shemek.

I'd agree with this. And yeah, I hope so too...

Originally Posted by Gronan of Simmerya

I may have to let my players discover the Olde Phoenix Inn just so I can easily get them to Tekumel for a while. Perhaps by way of Barsoom, or, if I'm feeling really sadistic, Amtor.

And have them say hello to Holger and Valeria, on their way through! If they are lucky, then maybe they'll meet Rupert and his lady there as well!

(Poul's trilogy was wonderful, wasn't it?)

Originally Posted by Shemek hiTankolel

Make sure they bring their bathing suits! For what it's worth if I were in your group I would be endlessly pestering you to take the group to Tekumel, or maybe Blackmoor.

Shemek.

Bathing suits? Bathing suits? You might want to check with the raffish gent over in the corner, sitting and having a beer with his two redheaded daughters and their twin husbands about this...

Mercy me! What would the Hamadryad think!!!

Or Dejah Thoris and Si N'te, for that matter?

And it's obscure literary reference night, here at the RPG site!

Try the veal, folks; we're having a special, and we'll be here all week for your amusement!

Shaboom! Shaboom!

Glad to hear your back injury is getting better, Uncle. That description of healing made me laugh...

I'm also glad that we reached an agreement. But as my Improv teacher said, there's not much to talk about when there's agreement!

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

And it probably didn't help that Neal said that he was about half done with the thing when Phil unilaterally sent the incomplete manuscript off to TOME. The latter had been told that they were getting a complete, ready to go to print set of RPG rules, and not having any experience in the business printed what they got.

The biggest single reason I was so delighted to turn my little DBA over to Tekumel Games was the simple stark fact that the hardest thing about doing Tekumel publishing was Phil's very real lack of patience with the publishing process. He'd gotten so used to the academic publishing process, where one simply turns the manuscript over to the print shop and they do what you tell them to, that he genuinely did not understand the need to edit, proof, and play-test a product. (My particular field of interest was and still are the miniatures, where it was a whole lot easier to simply do the figure - Phil very, very rarely did a 'yea or nay' on any miniatures, as he assumed that I'd be able to get that right the first time.) Phil just could not sit still long enough to really be an effective publisher, and he never had the patience to let an external publisher do their job.

Well, I guess the Professor, like all humans, had his flaws...too bad publishing was one of them, but then, if it was exchanged, he might have published and promoted brilliantly one of the many settings I call simply "not worth the attention"...
I'd rather have the current situation, if it was a choice between those two.

Gasp! I'm now a total heretic, I know!

Originally Posted by d(sqrt(-1))

I've been quizzing Jeff Dee on the Bethorm forums about rules interpretations and errata - he's probably got fed up with me by now! But it's a good set of rules. BTW the Kurt Hills Gazetter just funded on KS a few weeks ago...

Yeah, I need to check what materials Kurt Hills backers have received already.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Well, all right. And it still brings a smile to my cherubic little face, too...

So, we're stitting around at the Siege of Sunraya, when we notice that dear old General Qutmu hi Tizena has a supply convoy passing by. A lot of the carts have boxes of crossbow quarrels in them, the labels say, address to his Legion of the Scales of Brown. Big boxes, too. About six foot long, and about three feet wide and tall. Lots of nervous Sarku priests in the escort, too. The Glorious General looks over at me and asks "What's so interesting , there, Chirine?" and I points out to my general that Scales of Brown are a heavy infantry legion, not crossbowmen. The Glorious General picks yet another sand-flea off his armor, and we amble over to the road to have a gander at the boxes. The Wormy Boys are all twitchy, and the Glorious General invites one of them to open one of the boxes for him. The priest starts making excuses, so the Glorious General has his guards open it. There's an Undead trooper of the legion inside, and we wind up arresting everybody for violation of the Great Concordat. Off we go to Prince Mirusiya, to report all this, and pandemonium breaks out; all and sundry drop in on Qutmu for a friendly visit, and we all arrive just in time to see him using Undead in open battle. Lots more arresting followed by sundry and summary impalements.

It's all in "Flamesong", if I recall, and our part will be in my book. Volume Four, if I recall.

Bwahahaha!
Who was playing the General, BTW? That's totally a plan some PC had concocted!

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

In order:

Yep. I've heard this kind of thing from a lot of people, over the years. Tekumel's more devout fans are one of it's biggest problems.

True for most settings, BTW. It's just even truer for Tekumel.

No. See also Harn and Jorune, which their creators told me that they'd specifically based on Tekumel. Neither had a lot of popular appeal; the vast majority of gamers simply don't want to have to deal with a 'complicated' and/or 'difficult' world setting. Somebody could do it, but they'd loose their shirts in the process. The one and only exception that I would make to this statement would be a Barsoom-based game, an that's not going to happen because of the IP fees involved. There are several very nice not-Barsoom sets of rules out there, and I'd look in that direction.

No. I think it would be a huge mistake, myself, for the reasons I just mentioned. The gamers will not buy it. And no, absolutely not; I will not make the mistake of getting involved in the business side of the house that I did in 1978 - much as I liked Dave and Phil, it was simply the one and only choice in my long and busy life that I truly regret.

I must point out that a lot of settings that came lately are about as much "swords and planet" as Tekumel. One of them, namely Exalted, was in the top 5 of the most popular games at some point, and maybe still rates in the top 10...

Yes; I bought a copy when it came out - see also the weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth when I told Pundit that I thought that "Arrows" would have been something Phil would have liked, and that it could be used pretty much 'as is' for running Tekumel. They are both 'India', and have a lot of the very same assumptions and basic world-setting attributes.

Again, and contrary to popular opinions apart from having the list of canonical spells, running Tekumel really doesn't necessitate a very specialized system. Lots and lots of systems (all the effect-based ones, for starters) can do the spells on the fly, too. Even some retroclones would be able to do that.
If anything, getting the social aspects of the setting right - like Flashing Blades does with 17th century France - would be the much greater challenge. Again, almost all systems would be equally successful at that.
So yeah, I'm sure Arrows of Indra could be used almost "out of the box". Then again, Honor+Intrigue would be, in all likelyhood, even easier. And Bethorm is already what I'd use if I hadn't started by adapting a different system.

Originally Posted by chirine ba kal

Next time you're in town, I'll buy you a beer and fill you in on what was going on behind your back, my General.

Sigh again.

For those not familiar with the story; at some point somebody (no, I don't know who) decided Tekumel stuff needed to be put on a more "professional" basis and a corporation was formed. Yours Truly was prez, and I even negotiated a princely $5 an hour wage. Living the Dream!

Chirine, may he be forever blessed, continued faithfully soldiering on, despite the fact that if anybody actually deserved to get paid for promoting Tekumel it was him.

Or maybe he was too smart to fall for it. Hey, wait a minute...

Anyhoo, we raised about $6000 in seed capital. A year later I resigned, exhausted and demoralized, and went to grad school. At that point the company had about $3000.

The good news is that we made enough in sales to pay me for a year and pay for various things (see below) without using up all the starting funds.

The bad news:

1) Making Tekumel "more professional" was NOT what was needed. I felt bad for years about "did I kill the company by insisting on being paid", but then realized that the merchandise I was making sold for far more than my wage. (Yes, I cast and shipped the miniatures, printed and mailed the modules, etc. I was pretty much it except for conventons.)

2) We -- and I think ALL of us involved -- totally underestimated the amount of "labor of love" that went into "Fan Tekumel," and that suddenly had to be PAID for in the world of "Professional Tekumel".

3) NONE of us knew a damn thing about business. Including, honestly, Phil and Dave. But including me, to the point where "If you sell out, raise the price" was a principle unknown to me. As discussed up thread I probably woudn't have been allowed to, but I never even THOUGHT of it.

4) Nobody realized -- and by "nobody," I mean "not even GAMA" -- that the D&D bubble had burst but good, and wasn't coming back. It wouldn't be until the late 80s or early 90s that people really figured it out. 1983 was about the WORST time in the world to start a RPG company.

5) We still had "Gold Rush Fever". This is closely connected to #4. "This crummy little D&D game made Gary Gygax rich, our BETTER game will make US rich!" Nobody at ALL had figured out yet that D&D was "lightning striking" and was a once in a lifetime phenomenon.

6) We didn't really have any idea of what we wanted to accomplish. "Make Tekumel the new D&D" sounds all very exciting, but what's your action plan?

The result was as you might expect. A huge part of the problem is that I was a rudderless ship. Now, going to the game conventions wasn't too bad; we often piggybacked with Adventure Games. Back then you could get more dealer badges for cons just for the asking, so it didn't cost Dave any more than he was already paying to include the "Tekumel Boat People," and we only had to pay for an extra table in the dealers' hall, and not admission. So for food and board we could get "Akbar and Jeff's Traveling Tekumel Road Show" going, and I got to say, boy howdy did we sell! So conventions, thanks to a lot of "donated for food and a place to sleep" labor, made a modest profit.

But the worst decision we ever made was going to the 1984 World Science Fiction Convention in Los Angeles, towing the Temple of Vimuhla in its trailer behind Perfect Mikey's car. The trip cost us a BOMB, between gas, lodging, food, convention admission, convention HOTEL ( !!), the traffic ticket we got in California for not having extra wide mirrors on the car, and the cost of strap-on mirrors, etc, etc..

And not a damn one of us had any real idea why we were going. Man of Gold had just come out, and Phil and I had a day long meeting with Donald Wollheim about MoG and Tekumel in general. Some idea of how far divorced from reality we were may be gained by considering that Phil, with an entirely straight face, was talking about movie rights and Hugo awards. Our general plan, however, seemed to be

1. Go to Worldcon
2. ???
3. Profit!

At the end of it all I was so exhausted and demoralized I not only stopped playing Tekumel, I stopped gaming completely for 15 years. Maybe it's a good thing it was me and not Chirine after all; I wouldn't wish that whole experience on anybody. "No reward is worth this."